Modernity’s Big Bang | Ruminant

Happy Saddam Saturday! Just kidding, we don’t do that kinda thing around here. But you know who does? That’s right, Jack Posobiec and his fellow alt-right goons. And while today’s Ruminant features more than enough of such nonsense, Jonah Goldberg doesn’t leave the high-minded among you hanging. Tune in to hear about nationalism, the Middle East, the French Revolution, Yoram Hazony’s Israeli NatCon, socialism, J.D. Vance, Trump’s short hand, the death penalty, abortion, slavery, and Hegseth’s firing-squad spectacle. Show Notes: The Remnant is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including the Saturday Ruminant, audio versions of all our articles and newsletters, and Jonah’s twice-weekly G-File—⁠click here⁠. Instructions on how to set up your members-only feed can be found here, and if you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, enormous lizards roamed the Earth. More immediately prior to that, Jonah spent two decades at National Review, where he was a senior editor, among other things. He is also a bestselling author, longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commentator for CNN, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. When he is not writing the G-File or hosting The Remnant podcast, he finds real joy in family time, attending to his dogs and cat, and blaming Steve Hayes for various things. The podcast transcription below was generated using artificial intelligence and may include occasional errors or misspellings. Music 0:00 [upbeat music] [groaning] Ladies and gentlemen, uh- Music 0:16 Can I please have your attention? Can you dig it? [audience cheering] Jonah Goldberg 0:27 Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Every single episode of the Editors podcast, which I listen to, you know, and I love those guys and, you know, they're friends and old colleagues of mine, but every single one, like, leave a review, subscribe, subscribe on YouTube, subscribe, leave a nice review. I just don't do a lot of that, and I think it's annoying, but that doesn't mean it's not important. Steve reads all of these industry newsletters about media business and stuff that I just... I cannot bring myself to Jonah Goldberg 1:06 pay that kind of granular attention to. And I figure if it's really important, Steve or Declan or somebody will send it to me, or I'll hear about it or whatever. But he sent me this thing from some guy who follows these things about the top fifty right-wing or conservative or right-of-center podcasts. There was some good stuff on there. There's a lot of stuff I've friggin' never heard of, and there was a lot of real garbage. And I... Look, I understand that, like, the Remnant or even the Dispatch podcast and advisory opinions were... I, I, I, I don't mean this as a bragging thing. I think this is just a fair description. We're higherbrow than what a lot of, a lot of the podcast audience wants. We complicate the narrative [chuckles] rather than spoon-feed the narrative that people want, uh, want to have. There's a place in the market for all that stuff, but, like, I, I just... I- I'm not trying to flatter you guys, but we're better than Sean Hannity, you know? We're better than Candace Owens. We're better than all those people. We're better every way that matters in this context, at the very least. You know, one of the, one of the trends that's going on is that this stuff is just moving... Like, a lot of these podcasts, whether I'd heard of them or not, whether they were good or not, they're essentially TV shows, right? People under forty who are over-indexed to listen to, to be cord-cutters anyway, they're just using YouTube and the internet as their new primary form of entertainment. They don't channel surf, right? I, I still am baffled by the popularity of watching podcasts. When I first started doing Glop, which was the first, you know, podcast I regularly hosted, part of the whole argument back when Ricochet launched and all that was that podcast... I remember Rob talking about, Rob Long talking about this, that podcasts aren't bossy. Like, you can Jonah Goldberg 3:01 listen to a podcast walking through an airport or while driving and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I, I, I thought that was right. That's one of the things I like about podcasts. It's, it's, it's a place I can fill up the crannies of my life where I can't read or can't watch TV. And yet, a huge chunk of the audience, podcast audience now, just sees them as TV shows and watches them like they're TV shows. And it's one of the reasons why I think the name podcast has kind of just gotta go. It's sort of like blog. But anyway, the simple fact is, is that the economics of the market, the economics of the industry are moving in that direction, and it's also the fact that if you like and subscribe to this, either... You know, it's a little awkward doing this, st- doing this pitch on the solo because we're, um... It-- this is behind a paywall, and we don't put the solo on YouTube. Someday, someday we'll fix that law. YouTube is turning into the place that's the most easily monetized. The numbers are paid attention there, and if you look at the, this list that Steve had sent me of the top fifty things, it's obvious that they're giving a lot of weight to the YouTube metrics, and the algorithm matters in terms of what gets pushed to people, what gets exposed to people. So if you can like and subscribe here, there, everywhere, if you can spread the news, that would be great because it's, it's an important... it's an increasingly important part of, of the Dispatch's model. You know, I'm not racing to expand the audience on, on the Remnant, and it would be kind of a violation of the name, but it does rankle to see some of the garbage that alle- allegedly ranks higher than us. Where to go? I meant to talk about this last week. You know, Trump said again that he understands AI and nuclear and all this stuff because his Interactive transcripts are available to Premium members. Join to follow along with the audio. Join Now